| Verbot |
Articles about Verbot |
Information AboutVerbot |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT VERBOT | |
| chatterbots | |
| artificial intelligence applications | |
VERBOTS Verbots combine natural language, artificial intelligence, and real-time animation with voice synthesis to create engaging virtual personalities on your computer or on the internet. Created by Conversive (formerly Virtual Personalities, Inc.), the Verbot (Verbal-Robot) is based on more than 10 years of AI experience and development. Verbots Today In 2004 Conversive launched Verbot version 4. In 2005 Version 4.1 of the Verbot Software was released with many feature enhancements and bug fixes, including built-in support for embedding C# code in outputs and conditionals. In Early 2006 Conversive launched Verbots Online allowing Verbot 4 users to upload their knowledge and show off their bots to the world. Early Beginning Virtual Personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Dr. Michael Mauldin 's work as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Historic Outline In 1994, Dr. Michael ("Fuzzy") Mauldin, Founder of Lycos, Inc., developed a prototype Chatterbot , Julia®, which competed in the internationally known Turing Test , for the coveted Loebner Prize . The Turing Test matches computer scientist judges against machines to see if they can distinguish a computer from a real human. This prototype version was refined and developed, and in 1997, Dr. Mauldin and Peter Plantec, a clinical psychologist, formed Virtual Personalities, Inc. (now Conversive, Inc.) in order to create a virtual human interface that would incorporate real-time animation as well as speech and natural language processing. The initial release, a stand-alone virtual person called Sylvie,® was beta-tested to the public. This release was well received, and finally, after several versions, the production release (deemed version 3) of the Verbally Enhanced Software Robot - or, Verbot® was deployed in the Fall 2000.
Beginnings The Virtual Personalities story goes back to 1978, where Fuzzy was attending Rice University. Fascinated by the idea of Eliza , he proceeded to write a program called "PET" for his 8 kilobyte Commodore Pet Computer. PET included simple induction as a way to posit new information, and once managed the following deep observation: Subject: I like my friend (later) Subject: I like food. PET: I have heard that food is your friend. Fuzzy got so involved with this, that he majored in Computer Science and Minored in Linguistics (interestingly, the AI course at Rice could count as credit for either a computer science major OR for a Linguistics major). Rogue In the late seventies and early eighties, the hippest computer game at Universities was Rogue, an implementation of Dungeons and Dragons where a small "@" sign would descend 26 levels in a randomly created dungeon, fighting monsters, gathering treasure, and searching for the elusive "Amulet of Yendor". Fuzzy was one of four grad students who devoted a large amount of time to building a program called " Rog-O-Matic " that could and on several occasions did manage to retrieve the amulet and emerge victorious from the dungeon. TinyMUD So when in 1989, James Aspnes at Carnegie Mellon created the first world, including tour guide, information assistant, note-taker, message-relayer, and even could play the card game hearts along with the other human players. In 1991, the first . Julia continued to log into to various TinyMUD's and TinyMucks for the next seven years, and also chats with hundreds of people a month over the internet. Lycos Julia's job was to explore a virtual world comprised of pages of textual descriptions, with links between them, and to construct an internal map of that world and answer questions about it (including path information such as the shorted route from one room to another, and matching information, such as which rooms contained a certain kind of object or textual description). It was therefore only a very short cognitive leap from Julia to Lycos , another robotic agent that explores a virtual world made of hyperlinked pages of text, and which answers questions about those pages. Virtual Personalities, Inc. In 1993 Peter Plantec, Hollywood animator, columnist, and (strangely also a psychologist)... was speculating in print that within two years we would see self animated, intelligent characters with personality and the ability to listen and talk. Later, in 1995 Peter called Fuzzy and asked about the possibility of putting Julia into some form of multimedia experiment. While both agreed that this was a good idea, each was too busy to follow up on it that year. But in 1997, Fuzzy called Peter and asked if he was ready to do it. He was. And thus was born, Virtual Personalities, Inc. Conversive, Inc. BLAAT CONVERSIVE AGENTS Conversive Agents are Conversive's Enterprise Customer Self-Service Solution. EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|